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_ "Yes, he's one of those men that don't know how to manage.
Good situation. Regular income. Quite enough for luxuries
as well as needs. Not really extravagant. And yet the fellow's
always in difficulties. Somehow he gets nothing out of his
money. Excellent flat--half empty! Always looks as if he'd had
the brokers in. New suit--old hat! Magnificent necktie--baggy
trousers! Asks you to dinner: cut glass--bad mutton, or Turkish
coffee--cracked cup! He can't understand it. Explanation simply
is that he fritters his income away. Wish I had the half of it! I'd
show him--"
So we have most of us criticised, at one time or another, in our
superior way.
We are nearly all chancellors of the exchequer: it is the pride of
the moment. Newspapers are full of articles explaining how to live
on such-and-such a sum, and these articles provoke a correspondence
whose violence proves the interest they excite. Recently, in a daily
organ, a battle raged round the question whether a woman can exist
nicely in the country on L85 a year. I have seen an essay, "How to
live on eight shillings a week." But I have never seen an essay, "How
to live on twenty-four hours a day." Yet it has been said that time is
money. That proverb understates the case. Time is a great deal more
than money. If you have time you can obtain money--usually. But
though you have the wealth of a cloak-room attendant at the Carlton
Hotel, you cannot buy yourself a minute more time than I have, or the
cat by the fire has.
Philosophers have explained space. They have not explained time. It
is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible;
without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an
affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in
the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four
hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is
yours. It is the most precious of possessions. A highly singular
commodity, showered upon you in a manner as singular as the
commodity itself!
For remark! No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no
one receives either more or less than you receive.
Talk about an ideal democracy! In the realm of time there is no aristocracy
of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never rewarded by even
an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely
precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be
withheld from you. Mo mysterious power will say:--"This man is a fool,
if not a knave. He does not deserve time; he shall be cut off at the meter."
It is more certain than consols, and payment of income is not affected by
Sundays. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into
debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste to-
morrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you.
I said the affair was a miracle. Is it not?
You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have
to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your
immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest
urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your
happiness--the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends!--
depends on that. Strange that the newspapers, so enterprising and up-to-
date as they are, are not full of "How to live on a given income of time,"
instead of "How to live on a given income of money"! Money is far
commoner than time. When one reflects, one perceives that money is just
about the commonest thing there is. It encumbers the earth in gross heaps.
If one can't contrive to live on a certain income of money, one earns a
little more--or steals it, or advertises for it. One doesn't necessarily
muddle one's life because one can't quite manage on a thousand pounds
a year; one braces the muscles and makes it guineas, and balances the
budget. But if one cannot arrange that an income of twenty-four hours
a day shall exactly cover all proper items of expenditure, one does
muddle one's life definitely. The supply of time, though gloriously
regular, is cruelly restricted.
Which of us lives on twenty-four hours a day? And when I say "lives,"
I do not mean exists, nor "muddles through." Which of us is free from
that uneasy feeling that the "great spending departments" of his daily
life are not managed as they ought to be? Which of us is quite sure
that his fine suit is not surmounted by a shameful hat, or that in attending
to the crockery he has forgotten the quality of the food? Which of us is
not saying to himself--which of us has not been saying to himself all his
life: "I shall alter that when I have a little more time"?
We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had,
all the time there is. It is the realisation of this profound and neglected
truth (which, by the way, I have not discovered) that has led me to the
minute practical examination of daily time-expenditure. _
Read next: CHAPTER II - THE DESIRE TO EXCEED ONE'S PROGRAMME, 28
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